Your comment about ref is not quite correct. If used on a blessed object, it will return the package the object has been blessed into. Otherwise, it will simply return one of the built-in types as strings, that is, one of qw/SCALAR ARRAY HASH CODE REF GLOB LVALUE/ Thus, use of eq in this case is actually correct. See perldoc -f ref for more information.

perl -pe '"I lo*`+$^X$\"$]!$/"=~m%(.*)%s;$_=$1;y^`+*^e v^#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'